However, instead of creating a tool, the Quintessence created a power mad villian who took the name Gog. With unlimited knowledge of and power to manipulate multiple timelines, Gog begins murdering Superman repeatedly ... each murder taking place a day earlier than the prior one.

In a final confrontation in the restaurant run by Booster Gold called Planet Krypton, Gog and the heroes from the various timelines learn of the existence of hypertime, revealed to them by Jonathan, the son of the Kingdom Come Superman and Wonder Woman ... Jonathan may also be the true identity of The Phantom Stranger, though this is never implicitly stated in the books.

But what's astounding is there's far more to it than that. On occasion, those tributaries return -- sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course...

While some DC Comics readers feared that hypertime would be used to explain such mundane things as inking errors, it hasn't actually turned out that way. Much of the promise of the hypertime concept has yet to be explored.